Install

websocketd is a single binary with no runtime and no configuration file. Installing it means putting that one file somewhere on your PATH.

Download a release

Every release publishes a binary for each supported platform on the releases page . Open the latest release, pick the archive matching your operating system and processor architecture, and download it. Builds are published for Linux on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and on 32-bit and 64-bit ARM, for macOS on Intel and Apple Silicon, and for Windows on 32-bit and 64-bit x86.

Unpack the archive and move the binary onto your PATH:

unzip websocketd-*.zip
sudo mv websocketd /usr/local/bin/

Each archive also contains the README, the license, and the changelog. You do not need any of them to run the program.

Debian and Red Hat packages are published alongside the archives if you would rather install through your system package manager.

Build from source

You need Go 1.21 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd.git
cd websocketd
go build

That is the entire build. It leaves a websocketd binary in the current directory, which you can move onto your PATH the same way. There is no Makefile to run and no dependencies to fetch by hand; Go's module system fetches the one library websocketd uses.

Check that it worked

websocketd --version

That prints one line: the release number, the Go toolchain the binary was built with, and your platform.

If your shell says command not found, the binary is not on your PATH. Check that the directory you moved it to is listed in echo $PATH.

Now go and use it: the tutorial takes about fifteen minutes and ends with a browser talking to a script you wrote.